


above all beware of sadness

by queenbaskerville



Series: something silent in us strengthens [1]
Category: Supernatural, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Canon Disabled Character, Child Abuse, Crossover, Deaf Character, Family Issues, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mentioned Kate Argent, Minor Character Death, Pre-Canon, The Hale Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:40:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27470602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenbaskerville/pseuds/queenbaskerville
Summary: Eileen’s grandfather was sixty-one years old, and he had stayed the course through his declining health just long enough to make it into the new century before he ran out of his allotted time.—Eileen Leahy goes to Beacon Hills for a funeral.
Relationships: Eileen Leahy & Isaac Lahey, Eileen Leahy & Lillian O'Grady
Series: something silent in us strengthens [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2007082
Kudos: 10





	above all beware of sadness

**Author's Note:**

> okay so i should preface by saying i've only seen teen wolf s1-3 and spn s1-9 (years ago...) but who can fault me for seeing gifs of sam & eileen on tumblr and then me falling in love with her... not my fault... anyway every time I saw her last name leahy I misread it as lahey and then bam! gave into the temptation to make everything I enjoy somehow about teen wolf. i spent way too much time researching the sometimes-baffling timelines of both spn and teen wolf in order to create this. i hope u enjoy. 
> 
> i am a hearing person and so if anybody has any additional tips/feedback about portraying deafness in this fic, i'm completely open to it and I apologize for any misrepresentation! 
> 
> fic title from an ilya kaminsky poem that appeared in poetry magazine and likely took another form and title when it reassembled itself in his collection deaf republic, which someday by god I will get my hands on

All the talk of 1999 was that the clocks might stop and the world might end when the year rolled over into 2000. The world didn't end, but a few weeks later, in late January, when Lillian met Eileen at the bus stop across the street from her school, Eileen learned that her grandfather passed away.

Eileen Leahy was thirteen—she would be fourteen in July—but she'd had plenty of run-ins with death by now, so the first question she asked was, "What killed him?"

Not a monster, it turned out. Not something they would hunt; not another mantle of revenge on her shoulders. Her grandfather was sixty-one years old, and he had stayed the course through his declining health just long enough to make it into the new century before he ran out of his allotted time.

Eileen could chart her life through the histories Lillian told her and the map that they traversed in their hunt for revenge. She couldn't remember an exact moment that Lillian had told her what happened when she was little, but the knowledge of what happened seeped into every aspect of her life. When Eileen had to decline invites to hang out after school because she needed to go train or hunt with Lillian—when she saw little kids holding their mother's hands when they crossed the street—every road trip, every newspaper clipping, every time the gun went off and the vibration traveled up her arm and through her shoulder—that kickback—she thought of the banshee. It murdered her parents; it stole her chance at a normal life. She felt the loss of that every day, and resentment curdled under her skin. Sometimes it felt like she wasn't even a person at all, just a festering wound disguised as a human being. And she knew what it felt like, a festering wound—she'd gotten an infection once from a hastily-stitched slice in her arm on a hunt, and the heat had crept up her arm and roared through her until her whole body felt consumed by fire.

Their bus arrived. Eileen gazed beyond the passengers across from her, through the window, at her school disappearing. This would be her first funeral—the first she could remember, anyway. She didn't know if Lillian had taken her as a baby to her parents' funeral or if she'd been spirited away before then. It was most likely that, although Lillian had remained in Ireland for a time, she'd taken Eileen illegally and wouldn't have risked attending the funeral with a child who wouldn't even remember it. Eileen imagines, though, that before they'd left for the states, Lillian had held her over her parents' graves, made promises, let her little eyes get one last look. Eileen didn't remember Ireland, but the cemetery in her mind was on a very green hill, the sky above ever-cloudy, the headstones just as grey.

Lillian took Eileen by the chin and turned her head. It was something Eileen wouldn't have tolerated from anyone else—barely tolerated now, irritated in the extreme sort of way only a teenager can be when somebody has crossed a boundary. 

"The funeral is on Saturday," Lillian said once Eileen was watching her mouth and her hands. "I'll take you to the store to buy a black dress before then."

"Who will be there?" Eileen asked.

"Your uncle and your cousins," Lillian said. "Us. Your grandfather's friends if he had any. Maybe some of Camden's friends," Lillian added. Camden’s name _,_ they'd decided years ago, was conveyed by the sign for male cousin, a C twisted next to the crown, followed by a quick A-M. “I don't know who else."

In 1986, Lillian had taken Eileen as an infant on instinct. She couldn't leave a child unprotected, not after such a severe attack from the banshee, and not when she didn't know whether or not the banshee would come back for Eileen. She'd give the child back, she planned, once she knew there was a guardian lined up to take care of her, and she'd properly warn that person about the banshee and continue her own hunt for it. But the Leahy couple didn't seem to have any living relatives, neither of them did, and no godparents had ever been named, and none of the Leahys’ friends seemed like they had the time for a baby... Lillian wasn't sure what to do. She looked into it further, uncertain, and realized that something was incorrect—Padraic Leahy’s father, Colin Leahy, was likely still alive; Padraic just wasn’t in contact with him.

Colin Leahy, she learned, had abandoned his wife and his son two years after his son was born and disappeared into the vast landscape of America. But Lillian wasn’t ready to give up on Eileen’s blood family—if there was a chance that Eileen had someone left, Lillian was going to get her there. By 1988, she had finally tracked him down in California—when he immigrated, he had changed his last name to Lahey and married an American woman, with whom he had a son, Sean Lahey. Colin and Sean were alive and living in northern California in a town called Beacon Hills.

Lillian had brought Eileen, a two year old by then, and they had met with Grandpa Colin, this Eileen was sure of. Whatever the conversation had been, and however she’d met Uncle Sean—who was twenty-five then and had a baby on the way—Eileen wasn’t sure what was said, but Lillian decided that she was best suited to raise her. Lillian told them that she was the sister of Eileen’s mother Maura, and that was why she had guardianship over her now that Padraic and Maura were dead. Lillian became Aunt Lillian during Beacon Hills visits. The truth stayed between Eileen and Lillian, their secret.

Eileen had never asked why Lillian didn’t give her to Grandpa Colin or Uncle Sean. She didn’t need to—she assumed it had something to do with Grandpa Colin’s disloyalty to blood, to family—it was Eileen’s own quiet grudge she held against him that he abandoned her father, since her father wasn’t around anymore to tend to it—or to the fact that she was deaf. It was better, she had long ago decided, that she lived with Lillian in Fremont instead of with one of her relatives in Beacon Hills. Fremont had the California School for the Deaf, at which she spent her days surrounded by kids like her, and she practiced her verbal speech and lip reading but most importantly had more people who knew sign language than just Lillian.

During a lesson about feminism in history, Eileen learned the phrase _social spheres_. It was in a gendered context in class, but after that, it was impossible for Eileen not to imagine herself trapped in glass spheres that converged and tore apart like rippling Venn diagrams. She was relieved she went to a deaf school and not a hearing one, but she wished she only felt relief, wished she only felt gratefulness. She hungered for friendships she could never have—she took advantage of the opportunity to exercise her increasingly sharp and bitter humor with her deaf classmates, and she felt free with them in ways she never felt among hearing people, but at the same time she felt almost entirely removed from them, these kids who had never hunted monsters. They hung out and had study groups and a community, while she almost never had the time for anything like that; Lillian always had another lesson. Outside of school, Eileen’s deafness and much of the rest of the world’s hearing was another layer of isolation. Lillian interpreted for her when necessary on hunts, but so much of the world was closed off—people who wrinkled their noses at her and said _why do you talk like that,_ people who ignored her, people who wouldn’t look at her when they spoke, people with thick mustaches and beards over their lips, people who were disturbed by her, mistrustful of her—she felt shorn off from the world in layers, her circle of belonging growing so small that it might not exist at all.

Eileen knew that the banshee deafening her as an infant was, to Lillian, an incredible cruelty that made her even more determined to destroy the monster, but deafness wasn't one of Eileen's own motives for revenge. She'd been too young to have any memory of hearing before she'd lost it. Having hearing would open up many of the doors other people had slammed on her, but they could also open those doors now with a little work, they just chose not to. They took the easy road and left her out. Those sorts of people, she had decided by her tempestuous thirteen years of age, were not the sorts of people she wanted to be around. And it was difficult to conceptualize what her life would be like if she'd been hearing instead of deaf—so, no. She didn’t miss it; it didn’t drive her revenge. All of her grief and rage she pointed toward training to avenge her parents.

The loss of Grandpa Colin was sobering in the sense that her family, what little she had left, was dwindling further. Now, besides Lillian, Eileen only had Uncle Sean and Camden and Isaac.

Beacon Hills was a few hours drive away. Eileen didn’t ask what music Lillian was listening to, only rested her hand on the car speakers and felt the rhythmic vibrations. She watched out the window and tried not to play with the hem of her black dress or mess with her hair, pulled back into a solemn pleat. She wondered if she was supposed to cry when they got there. She didn’t feel much like crying. Lillian took Eileen to visit her extended family intermittently, so she’d spent time with him, but he was—well. He was Grandpa Colin. He always smelled like cigarettes and whiskey or cheap beer, he didn’t sign, he refused to shave his handlebar mustache so it would be easier for her to read his lips, he almost never smiled. It wasn’t like Eileen herself was a barrel of smiles, and she didn’t want to be, but the lines of his face were always so harsh, and when he wasn’t sitting down he _loomed_. It was unpleasant, if they were all together, to watch Camden and Isaac freeze; that was how she knew Grandpa Colin was yelling. He always had a gruff hand with them in a way he never had with Eileen—he only hit her once. One time. She couldn’t remember what she’d done, but she remembered the wind knocked out of her, her sore elbows when she hit the floor. He’d never done it again after that, but she could tell it frustrated him that she didn’t hear him yell, never mind the fact that she could guess well enough what he said.

She would miss his puzzles. On his softer days, he’d pull a thousand piece puzzle from a closet, depicting a scene from Ireland.

“Where your father was born,” he said when he brought out a puzzle of St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral in County Cork. For a little while, Eileen had been young enough to think that he literally meant the cathedral, not County Cork in general, and she was in awe of the architecture, wondered if she’d also came into the world in a building so beautiful.

Camden, who was eleven now, who would be twelve soon, had always hated puzzles. He got too easily bored by them, which Eileen couldn’t stand; hunting required patience and attention to detail, this was just more practice. He was such a baby. Isaac, the actual baby, three or four now, was always too little to help with them. The two of them both flinched on days when Grandpa Colin would sweep the whole puzzle off the coffee table, and Eileen knew they hated his shouting, but she couldn’t hear it, so if she just didn’t look at his pissed off face then it wasn’t upsetting. She liked the arc of the puzzle pieces, watching something so organized and meticulous collapse. And picking up all the pieces killed time.

Uncle Sean was talking on the phone when Lillian and Eileen walked inside the funeral home. He acknowledged them with a flick of his eyes and continued whatever conversation he was having. There were not that many people filtering into the few rows of chairs—some old people Eileen guessed were Grandpa Colin’s friends or coworkers, and a boy she recognized as one of Camden’s friends and his parents.

Camden and his friend were playing on their Gameboys in seats to the back. Eileen left Lillian to walk over to them.

“Hi, Camden,” she said.

He said something without looking up from his game.

“What did you say?” Eileen said.

The rise and fall of his shoulders showed his irritated huff. He looked up so she could read his lips.

“I said, I’m busy.”

He made an incredulous face at her like he couldn’t believe she was still standing in front of him and went back to his game. The other boy hadn’t looked up once, but he’d made a disgusted face when she started talking.

Eileen pulled a disgusted face at them too, even though they weren’t looking, and she left them to it. Isaac was sitting alone at the front, very still, not even kicking his legs. She gently ruffled his curls when she reached him.

“Hi, kid,” she said.

He peered up at her and said, “Hi, Eileen,” while signing a clumsy hello with his tiny hands.

“Doing good?” she said.

“I’m okay,” he said.

She sat down next to him and held his hand. They both looked at the open casket in front of their row of seats, in which Grandpa Colin lay. He seemed smaller in death. He still had that long frame, but he wasn’t as intimidating when he lay so still. She’d never seen him in a suit before, either. He couldn’t loom or glare and he wasn’t dressed like himself. The unease in her settled. This was going to be fine.

The group of people was small enough that Eileen stayed seated in the front row with Uncle Sean, Camden, and Isaac. Lillian sat somewhere behind them. The service was short. There was no interpreter. Eileen did her best to read lips, though, and the program had the obituary, so she got the gist: _Colin Lahey, 1939–2000, an Irish immigrant proud to live in America, survived by his son Sean and his grandchildren Camden, Isaac, and Eileen_.

The program creased in Eileen’s hands. It didn’t seem fair that she was mentioned last when she was the oldest—and nowhere did it mention her father, the son abandoned in Ireland. She tried not to glare at Grandpa Colin in his casket—not because glaring wouldn’t change anything, she’d long held anger for things that couldn’t be undone, but because she didn’t want Isaac next to her to notice and wonder why she was upset.

The program had the Bible readings, too:

_“Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones? It is God who acquits us. Who will condemn? It is Jesus Christ who died, rather, was raised, who also is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. What will separate us from the love of Christ?” Romans 8:33–35._

She could tell when they’d reached this part in the service because she could lip read a few key words, and she noticed Uncle Sean—who did not keep the faith in even the half-practiced that Grandpa Colin had done—started nodding out of the corner of her eye, his face hard and righteous. She didn’t understand why he cared so much, but she still traced the letters on the program with her fingers. What was it about this verse that made his eyes catch fire behind his glasses?

_“For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” 1 Corinthians 15:52._

Eileen refrained from scoffing at this second one. She was a hunter; she’d dealt with the raised dead. Not exactly a pleasant future, these incorruptible dead—they had better still be ghosts with weaknesses, or they’d be roaming unhappily and wreaking havoc forever. She looked at Grandpa Colin, still and stiff, and she imagined him shattering the windows at Camden and Isaac’s house, imagined their stovetop catching fire, imagined puzzle pieces flooding the stairs to the basement. This was the part where she became a hunter instead of a granddaughter—she pictured the ghost’s mouth open inhumanly wide, imagined the heat of Camden and Isaac huddling behind her, afraid of his shouting, and her unmoved stance in her permanent silence, felt the gun in her hand, the kickback of the shot, rock salt tearing through Grandpa Colin and his looking form dissipating in the dark kitchen.

It was easy to imagine herself digging up Grandpa Colin’s grave for a salt and burn once their little procession reached the actual cemetery that his casket would be lowered into. Grandpa Colin and Uncle Sean both owned most of the cemetery; Camden and Isaac spent a lot of time here when their father brought them with him to work—he was a swim coach at the high school, but worked at the cemetery after school and over the summer—and it had even been her play-place sometimes if Uncle Sean and Grandpa Colin were both busy with work when Lillian dropped her off. She and Camden and Isaac roamed the grounds and made stone rubbings of the names on the gravestones. Camden often took charge of their evenings—she usually had no idea what he was on about, since he didn’t care enough to keep his mouth in her line of sight, but she pulled Isaac along and let Camden blather to him. Eileen’s mind would drift—she usually thought of hunting and wondered if any of these buried bodies had been inhuman, wondered how many of these long-dead people might’ve once become ghosts. Before Isaac was born—before Camden was old enough to take charge—Eileen remembered being the one to lead, and they’d run hand in hand on the paths, careful to keep off the grass so they wouldn’t get in trouble with Uncle Sean. Camden usually brought an action figure or two with him back then, and they’d make the toys fight each other on the narrow tightropes of the tops of headstones, even though he’d sometimes get frustrated with her and quit when she wasn’t following the storyline she couldn’t hear him tell. Sometimes he’d lunge at her and they’d fight in the path and shred the skin on their knees and elbows. Camden liked to be the killer, the winner, but Eileen was a hunter-in-training and two years older than him and didn’t quit easy.

As Grandpa Colin’s casket lowered into the ground, Isaac leaned into Eileen’s side. He hadn’t let go over her hand in the church and he hadn’t let go of it in the graveyard once he’d exited his dad’s car and found her with Lillian. She felt him start to shiver against her leg in the chilly wind—even California was cold in January—so she lifted him up and kept him on her hip. She wasn’t sure how long this was going to take, but she knew she could hold him for a long time—she was strong, and he was only four, and even for a four year old he weighed very little. He buried his head in the crook of her neck and she rested her cheek in his curly hair.

The priest was saying something over the open grave. Still no interpreter, so she zoned out and gazed beyond him, spotting a familiar headstone. The Argent plot was a little ways away from the Lahey plot in a more costly patch of land. The Argents had only buried a few dead here so far—the headstone she recognized was from when she’d once done a graverubbing of Alexander Argent, who—Kate Argent had told her last summer—killed himself in a motel in ’77 because he’d been bitten by a werewolf.

Kate was three years older than Eileen, and stronger and blonder and prettier, and a better shot— _for now_ , Eileen’s still practicing—and whenever Lillian came by to see the Argent family, Eileen followed Kate everywhere. Sometimes Kate ignored Eileen entirely, pretended like she really was just her shadow; sometimes they trained together, sweaty and bruised in the leaves; sometimes Kate took her to her room and dressed her up like a doll, and Eileen let her, if only because Kate looked at her dead-on when she was doing her makeup.

Kate had only cared about ASL along enough to badger Eileen into teaching her all the swears, and then she’d gotten bored with it. She often didn’t care to look Eileen in the face when she was talking, either. But when Kate told Eileen the story about Kate’s Uncle Alexander, she was very still, very intent. Her eyes were bright and her expression had that fervent look to it of someone in awe of a martyr, someone eager to get a taste in any way they can of that type of passion and violence. It had unnerved Eileen just as much as it drew her in. Kate was as magnetic as she was frustrating.

With Isaac in her arms, Eileen didn’t have her hands free to sign at Lillian, so she waited until after the official things were over and people started to disperse before she verbally asked her, “Are we going to visit the Argents today?”

“I think they’re out of town for the weekend,” Lillian said, which Eileen knew to mean they were hunting something. She’d have to ask what it was when her hands were free to sign or when there weren’t so many people around, whichever came first.

Eileen asked Lillian once when she was much younger why they didn’t tell her blood family about monsters and hunting.

“They wouldn’t believe us,” Lillian had said. “Think of them like ordinary people. They’re not in any danger that would prove what we’d say.”

“But what if the Hale werewolves put them in danger?” Eileen had said. Whenever they talked about that particular werewolf family, they signed an H before the werewolf sign, which was a pinched hand in front of the nose to illustrate a wolf snout.

“The Argents won’t let that happen,” Lillian said, Argents being an A followed by the sign for silver, which was quicker than finger-spelling it.

Eileen had envied them for their ignorance of hunting, their normal lives, as much as she looked down on their idiocy for it. They walked through their own house and didn’t even know about the protection sigils she’d carved in odd places—she’d gone under the basement stairs, she’d slid under their beds. Isaac read the comic books Camden gave him and didn’t know the real lore. Camden thought he was all that, so tough and stuck up, and he knew nothing of the real world, nothing of what she’d had to face.

Eileen could put Isaac down now if she wanted, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He just seemed so cold and tired, and she didn’t know what kind of mood Uncle Sean was in right now, whether he’d carry Isaac around and gently put him to bed for a nap or if he’d be irritated with him today.

“We’ll take Isaac in our truck?” Eileen said.

Lillian smoothed Eileen’s hair.

“Sure, love,” she said. To Isaac, she said, “Hey, wee fella. How are you feeling?”

Eileen felt the movement of his jaw but didn’t know what he said. Probably an, “I’m okay,” like he’d said to her at the funeral home; for a four year old, he rarely complained.

“I’m sorry about your grandpa,” Lilllian said.

Isaac said something back to her. Eileen stopped paying attention and watched beyond Lillian as Uncle Sean grip Camden’s shoulder while talking to Camden’s friend’s parents. Uncle Sean shook the father’s hand with his free hand and then the boy and his parents went on their way. Uncle Sean steered Camden back toward the graveside where Eileen and Lillian were.

“...take him with you,” Uncle Sean said. “...finish...” He gestured to the grave.

There was some back and forth with Lillian—maybe she thought it just as weird as Eileen did that he didn’t have their regular machinery guy working today of all days—and then Camden was walking back with them to Lillian’s truck. Isaac nestled up next to Eileen in the backseat but didn’t fall asleep. Eileen thought Camden, up in the passenger seat, might play his Gameboy, but it remained turned off in his lap while he stared out the window. Lillian’s fingers rippled on the steering wheel—she must be listening to a song. Eileen wondered what it was, and she wondered what her next visit to the Laheys would be like now that her grandfather was gone. She combed her fingers through Isaac’s curly hair. Was this his first funeral, too, or had his dad taken him as an infant to his mother’s funeral? That was one that she’d missed, too far out of state on a hunt, but she vaguely remembered signing a condolences card with her nine-year-old scrawl for Uncle Sean and Camden, and Lillian had had to remind her about newborn Isaac.

Well. Whether it was Isaac’s first or second, it was still her first, and still Camden’s second, and Eileen kept her hand in Isaac’s hair and hoped that it was the last one any of them would have to sit through for a long time.

In the driver’s seat, Lillian gazed out the windshield and touched her hand to her neck. She wore a crucifix necklace there, Eileen knew. Maybe she was praying for this to be their last funeral for a while, too.

**Author's Note:**

> if you made it this far, thank you for reading! I plan to write more in this crossover universe, although I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it
> 
> a few timeline details if it helps (some canon, some mine)
> 
> 1983 Kate Argent is born (also Sam Winchester & Laura Hale)  
> 1986 Eileen Leahy is born, banshee incident occurs  
> 1988 Camden Lahey is born (also Derek Hale)  
> 1995 Cora Hale is born  
> 1996 Isaac Lahey is born, his mother dies in childbirth  
> 2000 Colin Lahey dies  
> 2002 Eileen is 16 and Lillian dies of cancer  
> 2006 Hale fire, Matt Daehler pool incident  
> 2008 Camden dies on active duty  
> 2012 “Teen Wolf Year 1” (seasons 1-3)


End file.
